MetaMOOC: Documenting the Literature Review and Survey Results

After the 3 November 2019 meeting I did the following to expand my understanding of first, the experiences of ChalmersX instructor veterans and second, how well did this correspond to trends I could find in the literature.

The instructor veterans had several suggestions but the most common challenges expressed were:

  • Understanding the expectations of them before commencing the project, including the time commitment
  • Editing a 50-minute lecture into the short video format expected in the xMOOC format
  • Discomfort in front of a camera
  • Designing a suitable course structure and plan when they had never experienced a MOOC as a student themselves
  • Insecurity about creating good exercises, the time and creativity required to do so
  • A desire for firmer guidance and project management, even a “how to get started guide.”

I began my literature review by considering these questions:

1. What are the typical challenges of transition or redesigning classroom instruction to fit a MOOC or e-learning experience?
2. What are some proven best practices of onboarding instructors to MOOC?

Then used GU library Supersearch with the following criteria:

Any field contains challenge AND Any field contains redesign AND Any field contains classroom AND Any field contains MOOC
SCOPE: Default / Everything
Publication Date: 10-YEAR; Publication type: Articles ;Publication type: conference proceedings ;Publication type: newspaper articles ;Language: English

This produced enough results that I selected a few good papers, read these, and selected papers referenced in them. As of January 2020 I need to read a bit more, but so far I have considered approximately 25 publications.

None of the papers used an established theoretical framework to structure the ideas– rather they used more of a project management mindset, often collecting ideas under headings of: motivations for creating a MOOC, preparing, developing, delivering, and evaluating. I chose the ADDIE model as a good framework for collecting ideas. You can see here how I am documenting my literature review and cataloguing ideas for both challenges and best practice suggestions. See the tabs Challenge Framework, Best Practice Framework, and Benchmarks to see how I am organising the ideas and from which sources they came.